Bush, Salinas and Mulroney To Sign Trade Pact Dec. 17

President Bush will sign the North American Free Trade Agreement on Dec. 17, while President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada will sign the pact the same day in their countries, the White House announced today.

The agreement, which would eliminate trade barriers among Canada, Mexico and the United States, will not take effect until legislatures in all three countries have approved it or legislation putting its provisions into law.

But the signing is nonetheless significant for two reasons. It will make it harder for President-elect Bill Clinton to make any changes in the agreement's text, and it insures that Congress will have to put the implementing legislation on a fast-track process, which permits no amendments.

The fast-track process that Congress authorized provides that any trade agreement signed by June 1 must be taken up by Congress on a yes-or-no basis.

Mr. Clinton and his transition team were not consulted before today's announcement, but Democrats did not seem to mind, in part because trade issues are politically touchy and addressing them exposes deep fissures within the Democratic Party over whether to open America's markets further to international competition.

The Bush Administration has engaged in a post-election flurry of trade policy initiatives. Carla A. Hills, the United States trade representative, threatened a trade war with the European Community two days after Mr. Bush's electoral defeat and ended up striking a broad trans-Atlantic deal two weeks ago to reduce farm subsidies.

Mr. Clinton has endorsed the North American pact, but he has promised not to sign legislation putting its provisions into law until he has negotiated three side agreements and has won Congressional passage of four other provisions to protect American workers.

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The House majority leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, said in an interview two weeks ago that he did not expect Mr. Clinton even to submit the implementing legislation to Congress until after all of these issues were resolved, a process that could take months. But once the agreement has been signed, Mr. Clinton could in theory wait for years to submit it and the pact would still be covered by the fast-track rules.

Administration officials feel personal pride in the agreement and wanted it signed by their President. "We wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of negotiating it if the President were not going to sign it," a senior official grumbled.

Canadian and Mexican officials have pushed for a quick signing for their own reasons. Prime Minister Mulroney of Canada must call a general election by next November, and his Trade Minister, Michael Wilson, recently said the pact would be put to a vote of Parliament soon after its signing.

President Salinas has been pressing the President-elect to pay more attention to the pact and to push it through Congress as soon as possible. The Mexican economy depends heavily on investments by foreigners who have assumed that the pact will take effect. The Mexican stock market quivers at the slightest indication that the pact might succumb to pressures from labor unions and other opponents in the United States.

Strong governing party majorities in the Mexican Senate and the Canadian Parliament are expected to pass the agreement without difficult.

Some Democrats expect the agreement to win Congressional approval, too. But the pact's future on Capitol Hill is hard to predict, because many of the incoming Congress's 122 new members have no clear position on the agreement.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 4, 1992, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: Bush, Salinas and Mulroney To Sign Trade Pact Dec. 17. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe